Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for his amendments, my response to which has been anticipated by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley—I would have been safe to put a fiver on it. Let me start with the noble Lord, Lord Freud, and the couple penalty. We had a debate about this last time. We do not accept the noble Lord’s analysis, and when we asked him last time about how costs featured in that analysis he was unable to answer. Also, his party has a commitment to introduce some transferable married couple’s allowance, which was costed at something like £4.9 billion. None of the benefit of that will go to people on low incomes who are not in the tax system; most of it will go to people who are on higher incomes.